THE
Idiot was unusually thoughtful — a fact which made the
School-Master and the Bib­liomaniac unusually nervous. Their
stock criticism of him was that he was thoughtless; and yet when he
so far forgot his natural pro­pensities as to meditate, they did
not like it. It made them uneasy. They had a haunting fear that he
was conspiring with himself against them, and no man, not even a
callous school-master or a confirmed bibliomaniac, enjoys feeling
that he is the object of a con­spiracy. The thing to do, then,
upon this occasion, seemed obviously to interrupt his train of
thought — to put obstructions upon his mental track, as it were,
and ditch the express, which they feared was get­ting up steam at
that moment to run them down.

"I
mean that you seem to have something on your mind that worries you,"
said the Bibliomaniac.

"No,
I haven't anything on my mind," re­turned the Idiot. "I
was thinking about you and Mr. Pedagog — which implies a thought
not likely to use up much of my gray matter."

"Do
you think your head holds any gray matter?" put in the Doctor.

"Rather
verdant, I should say," said Mr. Pedagog.

"Green,
gray, or pink," said the Idiot, "choose your color. It does
not affect the fact that I was thinking about the Biblio­maniac
and Mr. Pedagog. I have a great scheme in hand, which only requires
capital and the assistance of those two gentlemen to launch it on the
sea of prosperity. If any of you gentlemen want to get rich and die
in comfort as the owner of your homes, now is your chance."

"In
what particular line of business is your scheme?" asked Mr.
Whitechoker. He had often felt that he would like to die in com­fort,
and to own a little house, even if it had a large mortgage on it.

"Journalism,"
said the Idiot. "There is a pile of money to be made out of
journalism, particularly if you happen to strike a new idea. Ideas
count."

"How
far up do your ideas count — up to five?" questioned Mr.
Pedagog, with a tinge of sarcasm in his tone.

"I
don't know about that," returned the Idiot. "The idea I
have hold of now, how­ever, will count up into the millions if it
can only be set going, and before each one of those millions will
stand a big capital S with two black lines drawn vertically through
it — in other words, my idea holds dollars, but to get the crop
you've got to sow the seed. Plant a thousand dollars in my idea, and
next year you'll reap two thousand. Plant that, and next year you'll
have four thousand, and so on. At that rate millions come easy."

"I'll
give you a dollar for the idea," said the Bibliomaniac.

"No,
I don't want to sell. You'll do to help develop the scheme. You'll
make a first-rate tool, but you aren't the workman to manage the
tool. I will go as far as to say, however, that without you and Mr.
Pedagog, or your equivalents in the animal kingdom, the idea isn't
worth the fabulous sum you offer."

"You
have quite aroused my interest," said Mr. Whitechoker. "Do
you propose to start a new paper?"

"You
are a good guesser," replied the Idiot. "That is a part of
the scheme — but it isn't the idea. I propose to start a new paper
in accordance with the plan which the idea con­tains."

"Is
it to be a magazine, or a comic paper, or what?" asked the
Bibliomaniac.

"Neither.
It's a daily."

"That's
nonsense," said Mr. Pedagog, put­ting his spoon into the
condensed-milk can by mistake. "There isn't a single scheme in
daily journalism that hasn't been tried — ex­cept printing an
evening paper in the morn­ing."

"That's
been tried," said the Idiot. "I know of an evening paper
the second edition of which is published at mid-day. That's an old
dodge, and there's money in it, too — money that will never be got
out of it. But I really have a grand scheme. So many of our dailies,
you know, go in for every horrid detail of daily events that people
are begin­ning to tire of them. They contain practically the same
things day after day. So many columns of murder, so many beautiful
sui­cides, so much sport, a modicum of general intelligence,
plenty of fires, no end of embez­zlements, financial news,
advertisements, and head-lines. Events, like history, repeat
them­selves, until people have grown weary of them. They want
something new. For in­stance, if you read in your morning paper
that a man has shot another man, you know that the man who was shot
was an inoffen­sive person who never injured a soul, stood high
in the community in which he lived, and leaves a widow with four
children. On the other hand, you know without reading the account
that the murderer shot his victim in self-defence, and was
apprehended by the de­tectives late last night; that his counsel
for­bid him to talk to the reporters, and that it is rumored that
he comes of a good family living in New England.

HE
WAS NOT MURDERED

"If
a breach of trust is committed, you know that the defaulter was the
last man of whom such an act would be suspected, and, except in the
one detail of its location and seat, that he was prominent in some
church. You can calculate to a cent how much has been stolen by a
glance at the amount of space devoted to the account of the crime.
Loaf of bread, two lines. Thousand dollars, ten lines. Hundred
thousand dollars, half-column. Mill­ion dollars, a full column.
Five million dol­lars, half the front page, wood-cut of the
em­bezzler, and two editorials, one leader and one paragraph.

"And
so with everything. We are creat­ures of habit. The expected
always happens, and newspapers are dull because the events they
chronicle are dull."

"Granting
the truth of this," put in the School-Master, "what do you
propose to do?"

"Get
up a newspaper that will devote its space to telling what hasn't
happened."

"That's
been done," said the Bibliomaniac.

"To
a much more limited extent than we think," returned the Idiot.
"It has never been done consistently and truthfully."

"I
fail to see how a newspaper can be made to prevaricate truthfully,"
asserted Mr. Whitechoker. To tell the truth, he was great­ly
disappointed with the idea, because he could not in the nature of
things become one of its beneficiaries.

"I
haven't suggested prevarication," said the Idiot. "Put on
your front page, for instance, an item like this: 'George Bronson,
colored, aged twenty-nine, a resident of Thompson Street, was caught
cheating at poker last night. He was not murdered.' There you tell
what has not happened. There is a variety about it. It has the charm
of the unexpected. Then you might say: Curious incident on Wall
Street yesterday. So-and-so, who was caught on the bear side of the
market with 10,000 shares of J. B. & S. K. W., paid off all his
obligations in full, and retired from business with $1,000,000
clear.' Or we might say, 'Superintendent Smithers, of the St.
Goliath's Sunday-school, who is also cash­ier in the Forty-eighth
National Bank, has not absconded with $4,000,000."

SUPERINTENDENT
SMITHERS HAS NOT ABSCONDED

"Oh,
that's a rich idea," put in the School-Master. "You'd earn
$1,000,000 in libel suits the first year."

"No,
you wouldn't, either," said the Idiot. "You don't libel a
man when you say he hasn't murdered anybody. Quite the con­trary,
you call attention to his conspicuous virtue. You are in reality
commending those who refrain from criminal practice, instead of
delighting those who are fond of depart­ing from the paths of
Christianity by giving them notoriety."

"But
I fail to see in what respect Mr. Ped­agog and I are essential to
your scheme," said the Bibliomaniac.

"I
must confess to some curiosity on my own part on that point,"
added the School-Master.

"Why,
it's perfectly clear," returned the Idiot, with a conciliating
smile as he prepared to depart. "You both know so much that
isn't so, that I rather rely on you to fill up."